Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Chinese malware infects 10 million Android devices

According to CheckPoint, 10 million Android devices have been attacked with a malware called HummingBad.

The malware has first been discovered in February but its presence is steadily increasing day by day.

Yingmob, is the group of developers that stands behind this malware which makes it even more interesting since it is a legitimate advertising analytics agency from Beijing.

According to Check Point, several teams from Yingmob is working on developing these malicious components.

How they started? They first began as a “drive-by-download attack” where people got infected while visiting certain websites.

"The first component attempts to gain root access on a device with...rootkit [software] that exploits multiple vulnerabilities. If successful, attackers gain full access to a device," Check Point said. "If rooting fails, a second component uses a fake system update notification, tricking users into granting HummingBad system-level permissions."

This kind of illegitimate advertising and forced downloading of apps led them gain - apparently up to $300,000 per month.

Fake advertising is not the only problem here because these teams are able to sell access to phones, leak information and other harmful activities. It is estimated that over 85 million smart phones have the group's apps installed, whereby only a small percent contains malicious software.

Beside Check Point, Google is also aware of this problem so they are constantly trying to block these kinds of installations to keep users safe.

Infected users are mostly located in China and India (1.6 million and 1.35 million reported cases)
After that, Philippines, Turkey and Indonesia are also at the top. US counts 288,800 and UK and Australia count over all 100,000 infected devices.

Yingmob is definitely not the only organization practicing these kind of harmful and fraudulent activities. HummingBad is also not the last malware that will affect Android devices worldwide. Choose security – choose Zemana Mobile Antivirus.

1 comment:

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